Category: Medical Ethics

Last week, Annabelle Potts, a girl with the deadly brain cancer DIPG, passed away. She had made the news in Australia and worldwide because she had been treated at Clínica 0-19 in Monterrey, Mexico, where Drs. Alberto Garcia and Alberto Siller treat DIPG patients with a secret unproven mix of intra-arterial chemotherapy injected directly into the arteries feeding the brainstem, all while...

For-profit stem cell clinics selling unproven and downright quacky stem cell therapies have proliferated over the last several years, with federal and state law seemingly powerless to stop them. Recently, the FDA and FTC have shown signs of acting to crack down on them. Now, the Medical Board of California is forming a task force to determine how to regulate physicians offering...

Integrative medicine proponents finally acknowledge their field is attracting bad apples but fail to identify the real source of their problem: It's rejection of science-based medicine, not lack of training in integrative medicine.

By definition, alternative medicine has not been shown to be effective or has been shown to be ineffective. Thus, alternative medicine is ineffective against cancer and can best be represented as either no treatment at all or potentially harmful treatment. It is thus not surprising that cancer patients who choose alternative medicine have a higher risk of dying from their cancer. A...

This is the conclusion of my series on Clínica 0-19, the cancer clinic where Drs. Alberto Siller and Alberto Garcia see patients with DIPG, a deadly brain tumor, whom they treat at Hospital Angeles in Monterrey Mexico with an unproven combination of intra-arterial chemotherapy with up to 11 drugs and a poorly defined dendritic cell immunotherapy. Some people have asked me: What's...

Last week, President Trump signed the worst federal right-to-try bill under consideration by Congress into law. Its purpose was never to help terminally ill patients, and now that it's law there will be nothing the FDA can do to protect vulnerable terminally ill patients who choose it. That's a feature, not a bug. That's because right-to-try is the result of a collaboration...